Date: 29th May - 3rd June 2025
Purist Gallery, King’s Cross Road, London
Artists: Ben Qi, Ben Grosse-Johannboecke, Sang-hyuk Kim, Ya Luo, Yidan Kim
Exhibition Text Installation views
"Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens."
To become a seer, the poet must undergo a long, immense, and intentional derangement of all the senses.
The purpose of this sensory derangement is to express dissatisfaction with social discipline. The question of ‘How to escape disciplinary power?’ demands persistent engagement. One example of this derangement can be seen in the term "voyant" itself—a key term in Rimbaud’s poetic theory—which refers to a state that transcends rationality, linearity, and the real, leaning instead toward the irrational, nonlinear, and surreal. Rimbaud’s verses are rich with expressions of symbolism and suggestion. "Emotional generation" takes the place of "logical construction."
In this context, the power of an artwork lies in its ability to evoke a non-verbal experience—an immersion, a loss of control, and a renewed perception rarely encountered in contemporary life. Derangement of senses is a mood that tears into the extreme, describing the imbalance between inner-outer emotional feelings.
More recently, Madsen, in his essay "MOOD OVER CONTENT," introduced the concept of "mood", describing a shift in contemporary art—a return to a kind of artistic essence. Contemporary art, particularly that of millennial artists, is gradually shedding the constraints of self-consciousness and the avant-garde, moving instead towards a mode of pure expression grounded in sincerity and spirituality.